Monday, 12 August 2013

Theatre v film?! Discuss.......

We have just started editing our first piece, and I know the film editing process is what truly defines film from photography and also from theatre but you know what? I find it dull! I feel it slows the process of creativity down, makes us rely on technology and removes the very art of it from our hands. The other members of my team disagree with me. The thing is I adore theatre, the fact that you can capture the imaginations of an audience when they are basically sat in a black box. If you can get an audience to buy into the story then, well then you have talent. You have truley suspended reality. That's magic. Forgive me I love the medium of film but I'm no film buff, I like stories and I like live. As an actor your control over the finished outcome of a film is entirely out of your hands. However when you do a piece of theatre you have an attempt at creating perfection every single evening. Yep I'm biased as an actress and maybe in time I will learn how to edit, to appreciate the process. It as an amazing way to capture the complete moment of perfection. And employing different, more exciting skills other than that which confined by the space of a theatre. Will shall see..........

3 comments:

I used to be a film junky, and would have chosen to watch even a mediocre film over the chance to watch a play, what a philistine I was! After 3 yrs involved in the theatre, mainly backstage until this yr, I have completely changed my mind. I would like to get involved in making films, there is something in them, but only in the immediate shooting process not the endless editing afterwards, but a play is infinitely more fascinating to watch, even the same one over and over as has been my privilege over the last 3 yrs. They only really start to come alive during the run, in front of an audience, slowly changing each night as the actors subconsciously attempt to morph the script into something approaching perfect expression. Or in some cases simply playful mutations. If you can somehow recreate that on film you're on to a winner! :-)

As Chelsea knows I disagree with her over the subject of editing being boring. Certainly it has its boring moments (not least early on in the editing process where one is just slotting scenes together for later improvement) but I would argue that at the moment when the editing starts to come together - when after an hour's work you nail the exact timing of a cut - the film begins to come to life in a way that is probably comparable to the cast of a play gelling halfway through its run. Editing is the only part of the film making process that is truly unique to that art form, and it allows things that simply aren't possible in theatre. Look, for example, at Taxi Driver (or indeed all of Scorsese's work): no play could ever get inside Travis Bickle's mind the way film does because the dissonant, irregular and counter intuitive editing style forces us to see the world through Bickle's eyes, indeed to feel how he sees the world, in an expressionistic fashion. For an even more blatant example check out Requiem For A Dream - that film is basically one giant edit and does something that could never be done with any other medium.

Film combines the disciplines of photography, theatre, music, literature and sometimes drawing in a way that is unique, but it is the edit that ties them together and it is the edit that can make cinema such an exciting medium.

That is not to say that film is superior to theatre. To directly compare the two is unfair on both of them. They are unique, and each can do things that the other can't.